11.10.17 Your morning briefing

The information you need to start your day, from PaymentsSource and around the Web:

Two wallets, one buy button: Visa has added Samsung Pay for Visa Checkout stores, enabling consumers who link their Samsung Pay account to a Visa Checkout account to make payments at more than 350,000 merchants. The collaboration, which has been in the works since March, takes advantage of Visa's open platform to spread Samsung's fingerprint authentication to hundreds of thousands of additional merchants. The partnership will appear as a co-branded Visa Checkout and Samsung Pay buy button, and will not require usernames and passwords. The collaboration will also spread Samsung's marketing incentives, which are designed to encourage people to adopt mobile payments.

Bloomberg News

Into the pool: PayPal is taking a different take on the "split the check after dinner" sales pitch of peer transfer apps, including some of PayPal's own products. A feature called "Money Pools" is an attempt to make it easier to combine money from different people into a larger sum, ostensibly for a group gift or a vacation. PayPal is pegging the release to its own holiday payments study that found most Americans get "stressed" when holiday shopping. Money Pools can track contributions of each person in the group, ensuring everyone in a group has pitched in for a gift. Each pool can be personalized with a goal and a deadline and a description of of the monetary goal, the gift and a deadline. It's also possible to add a photo, decide whether to keep participants public or private and send people reminders by linking the pool to text, email, Facebook or Twitter.

Cashless sport: Sports often provide a venue for new payments technology, such as Visa testing wearable payment devices at the Olympics, the Oakland Athletics deploying Near Field Communication at its stadium, or the Phoenix Suns introducing smartphone-powered reverse auctions. U.K. football club Bury FC is issuing a new prepaid card that's part of a migration away from cash at the club's Energy Check Stadium. Technology company tappit is powering the card, which fans use to tap against point of sale terminals at concession stands, restaurants, social clubs and retail shops. The club is promoting convenience, since spectators don't have to produce cash, but it also provides a data trail that can be used to inform marketing and the items the club decides to sell at the stadium in the future. The stadium is not abandoning cash entirely, but does consider the prepaid card part of a migration to that end.

China to France:Travelers from China are quickly becoming a must-have market for retailers and issuers alike. BNP Paribas is introducing WeChat Pay to retailers in France, with plans to expand across Europe. The addressable market is substantial, as more than 7.4 million Chinese tourists visit Europe each year. The first deployment will come at the Galeries Lafayette Haussmann and BHV MARAIS in Paris. BNP Paribas also has an agreement with Alibaba and its affiliate Alipay, linking the two Chinese services to most of Europe's major payment processors and point of sale vendors. AliPay and WeChat control about two-thirds of the Chinese digital payments market, according to Finextra.

Bango's gateway to Egypt: Fresh off a partnership with Amazon to expand carrier billing in Japan, Bango has struck a deal with mobile connection company Victory Link to support carrier billing across all major Egyptian mobile operators. Bango will be able to reach 90 million connected mobile devices through the partnership and a SIM penetration of 100%. Android is the primary operating system in Egypt, with 85% of the mobile phone market. The market is also a gateway for Bango to reach other markets in the Middle East and North Africa. "This relationship with Victory Link means Bango can support its app store partners' growth ambitions, opening up more market first territories to expand their carrier billing footprint," said Ray Anderson, CEO of Bango, in a release.

From the Web

Transparent Transactions: How Blockchain Payments Can Make Life Easier For B2B CompaniesForbes | Thu Nov 9, 2017 - Blockchain is the technology behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Through blockchain technology companies can create an irrevocable digital ledger of transactions. “The technology can be integrated into business processes today, not even in the near future. And smart contracts can be created for literally any task: from smart homes and property insurance, to payment cards and logistics,” says Alexander Borodich, Founder of Universa, a blockchain technology company that enables its users to create smart contracts. Additionally, blockchain technology removes the need for a central authority to manage transactions, making these transactions highly secure and impenetrable for hackers.

Swiss bourse SIX eyes sale of majority stake in card payments unit: chairmanReuters | Fri Nov 10, 2017 - Swiss stock exchange operator SIX Group is open to selling a majority stake in its card payments unit with the aim of growing the business, Chairman Romeo Lacher told Reuters. “We are prepared to sell the majority of the cards business. We are now starting talks with possible interested parties,” Lacher said in an interview. “We hope to be able to say in the second quarter of 2018 with whom we are entering a partnership.” SIX said on Friday it will split out the business, which processes payments and provides debit and credit card terminals to retailers, restaurants and hotels, from its core business in preparation for the stake sale.

There were more than 26,000 new blockchain projects last year – only 8% are still activeCNBC | Thu Nov 9, 2017 - It is one of the fastest growing technologies around, but the majority of blockchain projects are abandoned within months, according to researchers. More than 26,000 open-source blockchain projects were created on the software collaboration platform GitHub in 2016, research by auditing giant Deloitte has revealed. But despite the overwhelming amount of interest in the technology, just 8 percent of these projects remain actively maintained. "The stark reality of open-source projects is that most are abandoned or do not achieve meaningful scale," Deloitte researchers said. "Unfortunately, blockchain is not immune to this reality."

More from PaymentsSource

NCR, Square face off in dual-screen hardware raceThe influx of mobile point of sale systems created an odd situation for retailers that now had to turn their screens around or hand over their smartphones to consumers to scribble an on-screen signature or type an email address or PIN. More manufacturers are addressing this awkwardness by giving shoppers their own screen.

Incumbents need machine learning to ward off fintech challengersWithout the constant innovation that artificial intelligence empowers, legacy companies will quickly lose their edge as competitors whisk away consumers with new offerings and customized products, writes Ajay Vij, senior vice president and head of financial services for Infosys.

Turkey’s Troy card goes global in Discover dealTurkey’s domestic card scheme Troy, launched in April 2016 by a coalition of 10 local banks, now supports card transactions outside of the country through a deal with Discover Financial Services.

The increasing adoption of virtual card payments by accounts payable departments has created an unex­pected complication for suppliers: more friction in the processing, posting and reconciliation of payments and receivables. The root of the problem is that most suppliers rely on a manual approach to processing e-mailed virtual card payments. Suppliers are forced to balance their organization’s need for operational efficiency and control with rising customer demand to pay with a virtual card. But a new breed of tech­nology enables suppliers to process virtual card payments straight-through, addressing the needs of buyers and suppliers. This paper details the growth of electronic business-to-business (B2B) payments, shows how manual approaches to processing virtual card payments cause friction in accounts receivables, describes a way to process virtual card payments straight-through, and highlights the benefits of friction­less payments.